N+: The Interview

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We talk to Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard about their addictive ninja platformer.

By Michael Thomsen

The emergence of downloadable games on home consoles has led to some wonderful rediscoveries of old genres that many gamers might have thought had died. Metanet's N+ for Xbox Live Arcade is a spare, but devilishly refined 2D platformer that is a direct throwback to the earliest PC platformers. The game unfolds in bite-size levels that encourage players to find a switch to open the exit door and then escape from the small rectangular levels as quickly as possible. In his review, Ryan Geddes described the game as, "just plain fun to play. The controls feel nice and the levels are creative and addictive." In an era of eight-figure budgets and 100+ person teams for triple-A games, N+ sprung from the hard work and imagination of two ambitious students at the University of Toronto.

We had the opportunity to catch up withMetanet Co-founders, and N+ creators, Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard. Here's what they had to say about the game. Also be sure to check Insider for our in-depth interview with Raigan and Mare about the world of independent gaming in Independent View.

IGN: When did you guys first start working on the initial tech? I know Raigan talked about the idea coming from having a circular collision box instead of the traditional square or rectangular one for the character.

Mare Sheppard: We came up with that stuff back in 2003, maybe. 2002 or 2003.

Raigan Burns: Some of the first stuff we did was just stuff moving around, so you need collision pretty quickly.

Mare Sheppard: And we knew that we wanted to do something a little different than what you typically find in games. Basically we had kind of a rough concept of something that we really wanted to play. So we were kind of working on, "How are we going to make this happen? What do we need to do?"

IGN: So you guys started out thinking about doing a 2D platformer and it just sort of mushroomed from there?

Raigan Burns: Yeah. It was a good simple thing to go for.

Mare Sheppard: Yeah, a good first project.

IGN: So it's been – well, let me check my math here – that's four years it took from the first experimental prototypes to the final release on Xbox Live?

Raigan Burns: I think it took even longer because for a couple of years before the Flash version came out we were still learning stuff.

IGN: You guys formed your partnership in '99?

Raigan Burns: Er, 2001?

Mare Sheppard: Yes.

Raigan Burns: So that was when we first started trying to make game-type stuff.

Mare Sheppard: And figuring out what the heck was going to be necessary to do that.

IGN: At what point did you realize that there was enough in the core prototype that you had made to build it into a full game; to stop prototyping and start iterating on the single idea?

Raigan Burns: I don't know. I don't think we really realized that. It was just more that we had so many little pieces lying around, and so we were like, "Let's just make a game." But not all of it, we had some rope stuff we were trying that we didn't end up using. But so we tried, sort of, everything we had laying around and we put a few of the best parts together.

Mare Sheppard: We had a good simulation of a drunk person slipping on a banana peel. That didn't exactly make it into N, it didn't quite fit.

IGN: So you were going to plant little bottles of alcohol around the level, make them sort of obstacles; if you hit the alcohol the screen would go all blurry?

Mare Sheppard: Maybe for the next game.

Raigan Burns: I think that turned into the rag doll later on.

IGN: That's really cool.

Mare Sheppard: Also, we had all these parts but it was sort of like, ok this is stupid, we've been developing this tech for so long. It was just time. It didn't really matter, we could finish whatever we needed to finish. But it was more that we finally had to finish the game. We were kind of getting sick of not doing a game.

IGN: I'm sure it's a grind.

Mare Sheppard: Yeah.

IGN: I know the world has changed a lot in videogames over the last four or five years. When you first started developing N, was it something you were thinking would just be an independent PC-type thing? When did you start thinking about doing console and handheld versions? Was that like an early target that you guys had as well?

Raigan Burns: No, we were just playing a lot of freeware. We were still students, so we figured let's just release it as freeware or whatever.

Mare Sheppard: I think back then we probably thought that making a console game would involve selling out to some degree. (laughter)

Raigan Burns: I don't think we thought that we could do it, either. I mean, I still don't know that we totally could do it.

Mare Sheppard: Yeah.

Raigan Burns: But anyway, Microsoft got in touch with us and that was really good. We didn't know that there was any demand because it is, you know, there's no graphics and whatever.

Mare Sheppard: I think it was really validating for us. When we finished N, we were really, really happy with it. That was our goal. We had taken a huge step forward, so we were really kind of content with that. It's very hard to know that there's potential beyond that. Like Raigan said, we weren't sure if anyone else would really like it. It's different when it's free, basically. You can't tell if people are going to pay for it.